Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
One of the big news items from last week was DropBox’s announcement that it had brought its file storage infrastructure in-house, moving (mostly) away from AWS: Years ago, we called Dropbox a “Magic Pocket” because it was designed to keep all your files in one convenient place. Dropbox has evolved from that simple beginning to […]
This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 385, features Tom’s essay on Agile portfolio metrics, Kim Pries talking about the value of diversity, and a Form Follows Function installment on sense-making and decision-making in the practice of software architecture. Tom and I discuss my post “Architecture and OODA Loops […]
Given the parlous state of most current enterprise-architecture ‘education’, is there any way we could do it better? One option might be to reframe EA-education as a game. I don’t mean ‘gamification’ as per the asinine ‘boy-scout badges for enterprise-architects’…
Two articles from the same site (CIO.com), both dealing with planned innovations, but with dramatically different results: “Report: Twitter’s algorithmic timeline may arrive next week” reports that rumors (or “rumors”) of Twitter switching from a chronological timeline to one curated algorithmically has led to an uprising under the hashtag #RIPTwitter. Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, has […]
In my post “Architecture and OODA Loops – Fast is not Enough”, I stated that sense-making and decision-making were critical skills for the practice of software architecture. I further stated that I found the theories of John Boyd, particularly his OODA loop, useful in understanding and describing effective sense-making and decision-making. My conclusion was that […]
Sense-making and decision-making are critical skills for the practice of software architecture. Creating effective solutions (i.e. the collection of design decisions that make up the product) is dependent on understanding the architecture of the problem. In other words, the quality of our decisions depends on the quality of our understanding of the context those decisions […]
This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 373, features Tom’s essay on #NotImplementedNoValue and a Form Follows Function installment on simplistic mental models. Tom and I discuss my post “All models may be wrong, but it’s not a contest to see how wrong you can be”, talking about cognitive […]
The one thing you can be sure of is that nothing is dependent on only one thing. Michael Feathers‘ tweet last week brought this to mind: Too often we construct simplistic mental models that fail to account for outcomes that are possible, but inconvenient for us in some way. As Aneel noted while discussing OODA […]
This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 369, features Tom’s essay on stand-up meetings, Kim Pries on mastery, and a Form Follows Function installment on #NoEstimates. Tom and I discuss my post “#NoEstimates – Questions, Answers, and Credibility” and take on whether it’s realistic to eliminate estimates given their […]
What do medicine, situational awareness, economics, confirmation bias, and value all have to do with all have to do with the architectural design of software systems? Quite a lot, actually. To connect the dots, we need to start from the point of view that the architecture is essentially a set of design decisions intended to […]
Following from that recent series on sensemaking and ‘Seven sins of dubious discipline‘, it seems worthwhile to look at that whole context-space from a different direction, another example of a proven metaframework for much the same kind of metadiscipline – namely…
Enterprise-architecture, strategy, and more: they all depend on discipline and rigour, in thinking, sensemaking, decision-making and action. But what happens when that discipline is lost? What are the ‘sins’ that can cause that discipline to be lost? How can we…